Category Archives: John Ford

PILGRIMAGE

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[With plot spoilers — don't read what follows unless you've seen the film . . .]

Pilgrimage,
a John Ford film from 1933, is unapologetic melodrama — it makes a
shameless appeal to the emotions.  A modern sensibility, schooled
in a cynical age, tends to resist this sort of appeal and I did, too,
the first two times I saw the film, and it worked — up to a point.  Beyond that point I found myself crying
like a baby.  I'm still not entirely sure how Ford got around my
defenses (twice!)  but I'm
forced to admit that he deployed the complex and mysterious resources
of melodrama with devastating effectiveness.

One of the key resources of melodrama, especially cinematic melodrama,
is indirection — while the conscious mind is busy resisting the
obvious assault on the heartstrings, the filmmaker finds an unexpected
avenue around the conscious mind, and the emotion catches you unawares
by some other route than the one you were defending.

Pilgrimage tells the story of
a possessive mother who ships her son off to WWI rather than lose him
to the young woman he plans to marry — and the kid dies “over
there”.  The fiancée is pregnant with the boy's child, whom the
grandmother refuses to recognize.  Something has to give — but
where, and how?

The first radical shift in the tone of the film is visual rather than
(explicitly) emotional.  The embittered old woman is offered a
trip to France to visit her son's grave and is shamed by her neighbors
into going.  We cut to the station where she's boarding her
train, and the cut is a shock — because the station is an exterior
location, shot in sunlight . . . the first such shot in the film. 
Everything else, even the rural exteriors, has been shot on a sound
stage, with moody, often expressionistic lighting.  (There is a
single shot prior to this, of a moving train at night, which couldn't
have been shot on a sound stage but might as well have been — all we
see is the train surrounded by darkness.)

From this point on in the film, Ford shoots on real exterior locations or sets built out-of-doors
as often as he can.  Real sunlight becomes a player in the
tale.  You don't need to notice this consciously for it to have
its effect.  It's disarming.  It prepares us for deeper
changes.  At the station, the mother of her son's child asks the
old woman to take a bouquet of flowers to the grave for her.  She
raises it up to the window of the train compartment where the old woman
is sitting, unseen by us.  Slowly the old woman's hand reaches out
and takes the bouquet, draws it in to the train.

We never see the old woman's face in this exchange — and we really
want to.  We want to know if she takes the flowers angrily or
tenderly, if she's softening or still hard as stone.  Ford
won't tell us.  The next time we see her, we look at her a bit
more closely — suspicious that Ford might be keeping something else
from us.  We might think we don't care about this old woman and
her damned intransigence — but the damned director better not try to
hold out on us like that again.  It's a master melodramatic stroke.

As we watch what happens to the old woman in France, surrounded by
other mothers who lost sons in the war, things develop in a conflicted
and complicated way.  The old woman finds a kind of companionship
she's never known in her life — and we suddenly realize the depth of
the loneliness that made her want to hang on to her son.  We'd
been looking at the pathology of it before, at its horrifying effects
on other people's lives — now we're blindsided by an awareness of the
unutterable isolation and sadness at the core of her being.  She
doesn't seem so much delighted as bewildered by her ability to get on
with others — and that's what breaks our hearts

But as the old woman comes alive among her peers, she also grows more
distant from them, dealing with the fact that they mourn loving relationships
with loving sons while she wrecked her son's life, and sent him off to
die.  She faces up to her guilt with courage but it estranges her
from these woman in whose company she has blossomed as a human being
for perhaps the first time.

In Ford films, of course, with their strong Christian, Catholic
underpinnings, facing up to one's sins leads to redemption — often by
miraculous means.  In this case it's a young suicidal man the old
woman meets on the street and saves from himself — a surrogate son,
who gives her a second chance to be a good mother.  This doesn't
remove her burden, but it gives her the final measure of courage she
needs to visit her son's grave.

That visit is shot on an exterior set built inside a sound stage, lit
moodily,
with a long tracking shot through the crosses in the graveyard. 
Stylistically, we're back where we started in the film — we have made
a kind of circle through the sunlight and come back to the shadows
again.  The old woman places the withered bouquet given to her by
her son's fiancée on the grave — then falls into the dirt and asks her
son's forgiveness.  She's saved — and somehow Ford has badgered,
enchanted and tricked us into following the mechanics of her salvation,
believing in them because we have felt them, in spite of
ourselves.  The Christian dynamic of confession, repentance and
redemption is rendered in convincing psychological terms.

In one sense, it's all done with mirrors, with clever deviations and
circumnavigations around the story's deep undertow — but the tears it
draws out of us, the tears it allows us, finally, to release, are quite real . . . and precious.

JOHN FORD AND THE COMING OF SOUND

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In
a 1966 interview John Ford was asked what happened when talkies
came to Hollywood.  “Nothing,” Ford said, “we just made them with
sound.”

That might seem like typical Ford bluster but on the evidence of his first three sound features for Fox — Born Reckless, Up the River and Seas Beneath, all included on the new Ford At Fox DVD box set (and all
from 1930!) — it seems like a fair assessment of his own remarkably
assured transition into the sound era.  (Ford had made one sound
short and one silent feature, The Black Watch, which was released with interpolated talking sequences, before the three sound features from 1930.)

The first two of the three are admittedly clumsy programmers. 
Ford moves his camera occasionally in these films but they also have a
number of scenes that feel stagebound, with proscenium
framing and little dynamic choreography within the shots.  Often
these scenes were staged and directed, at Fox's insistence, by “dialogue experts” with stage experience.


The results could be truly dreadful — especially so for a film like Born Reckless,
which was meant to be a gritty underworld drama.  To hear actors
portraying hoods declaiming street slang in theatrical tones, with
slight pauses between lines to avoid overlaps, is laughable today, and
was probably laughable to a lot of people when the film first came
out.  Interestingly there is one scene in a bar, undoubtedly
directed by Ford himself in an experimental mood, which features fast
overlapping dialogue by a number of characters.  It's impossible
to make out much of what's said but the film suddenly feels modern for
a few moments.

Up the River, a whimsical
prison comedy, had better lead actors — Spencer Tracy and Humphrey
Bogart no less — and so feels a bit more naturalistic, but it's a
routine film, with Ford often straining too hard for his comic effects,
as he had a habit of doing throughout his career.  The inspired
visual touches are few and far between.  It doesn't help that Up the River
as presented in this set derives from a severely damaged print, with
missing frames (and thus dropped bits of the soundtrack) which make the
dialogue in several places impossible to follow.  Apparently this
print represents the best surviving material for the film.

Then suddenly we have Seas Beneath. 
The story material is potboiler stuff — recounting the adventures of
some plucky U. S. sailors in WWI venturing forth on a decoy ship to
hunt German submarines.  But visually the film is breathtaking,
with scenes shot at sea that have to be seen to be believed.  Even
the built sets, for the episode when the sailors go on shore leave in
the Canary Islands, have solidity and depth and often look out onto
exterior sets alive with action.

The delivery of dialogue is occasionally stilted, but you can see that
Ford was going for something resembling natural speech.  He's
greatly aided by George O'Brien (above) in the lead role, whose lack of stage
experience is a decided advantage to him here.

The film has some remarkable action sequences and many beautiful,
powerful images, reminiscent of silent-era filmmaking.  Ford
doesn't seem to be straining against any limitations imposed by the
microphone — he seems perfectly at home in what amounted to a new
medium.  The visual bravura lifts the film above its pedestrian
story and script, as it so often did in the silent era.  One can
easily imagine it as a silent film.  Ford just made it with sound.

HANGMAN'S HOUSE

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Hangman's House is the last, and least, of the five silent films included in the new Ford At Fox box set.  It's not a bad film, exactly, just sort of respectably mediocre.

Ford here abandons his effort to out-Murnau Murnau.  He moves his
camera very little, and only once or twice with any real effect or
beauty.  Generally he returns to his more characteristic style of
fixed camera positions looking into deep spaces with lots of
choreographed movement within them.  There is some moody lighting
here and there, and some fog effects on studio “exterior” sets,
reminiscent of those in Sunrise — but the film rarely comes alive visually.

You get a feeling that Ford simply wasn't all that inspired by this
somewhat creaky melodrama — entertaining enough, but just
barely.  Viewers who only know Victor McLaglen's work as a comic Irish drunk in later Ford films will be surprised by his easy, restrained performance here.  It makes you wish he were the
romantic lead in the film, instead of the limp Larry Kent.  And there's one
really powerful camera move — in on the villain as he appears suddenly
in an apparently deserted house.  It's spooky and unsettling — like the push-in on Ethan's face in The Searchers as he registers the horror of the condition of the female captives just  freed from the Indians.  It's markedly different from the longer, Murnau-esque camera moves in Four Sons, which are typically about exploring locations or expressing high spirits.

In his book on Ford, Andrew Sarris said that if Ford's career had ended
with the coming of sound, he wouldn't be recognized as a major
director.  Even Joseph McBride, in his notes for this new set,
says that Pilgrimage, a talkie from 1933, is Ford's first great film.  Having seen just the five silent films in this set, along with Kentucky Pride a few years ago, I must say I find these judgements puzzling.  3 Bad Men and Four Sons are hardly lesser works than Pilgrimage, The Iron Horse is a masterful film with elements of greatness, and Four Sons is one of the finest achievements of the silent cinema.

Ford would go on to make finer films, but he was “major” well before the coming of sound, at least in my book.

FOUR SONS

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Four Sons,
from 1928, is one of the greatest works of German expressionist cinema
— even though it was made by the Irish-American John Ford in
Hollywood, U. S. A.  Ford doesn't just seem to be working under
the influence of Murnau here — he seems to be channeling Murnau. 
If the film had somehow been misattributed to Murnau, it would be very
difficult to correct the mistake by means of a stylistic
analysis.  Ford even, at one point, seems to be following in
Murnau's missteps — Four Sons, like The Last Laugh,
has an odd extended epilogue which violates the tone of the rest of the
film but somehow seems to work in spite of that, lightening the mood
in a strange, surreal way without diminishing the power of the work as a whole.

In Four Sons Ford moves his
camera as elegantly and expressively as any director ever has — and
the plastic invention involved is ravishing.  The lighting is
typical of Murnau, employing soft, glowing, complex chiaroscuro
effects as opposed to the stark contrast of light and shadow often
associated with expressionist cinema (and which Ford himself came
to favor in his later “expressionist” films, from The Informer to The Fugitive.)

Ford had two great masters in his formative years, first Griffith and
then Murnau.  What's astonishing is how totally he was able to
absorb each man's style — he didn't seem to be imitating it so much as
working within it naturally and unselfconsciously.  Maybe even
more astonishing is that Ford absorbed Murnau so quickly.  We know
how powerfully Sunrise
affected him — just from viewing the rushes he declared it the
greatest film ever made.  Less than a year later he was working
with full confidence and mastery in the Murnau style — and even shot
parts of Four Sons on sets from Sunrise that were still standing.

Apart from its lack of a strong female lead, Ford's Just Pals
could have been directed by Griffith and would rank among Griffith's more
enjoyable minor films.  The epic visual poetry of Ford's The Iron Horse bears favorable comparison with the epic visual poetry of The Birth Of A Nation — which is saying a lot.  If Four Sons had been directed by Murnau, it would rank among the German director's most important works — and that may be saying even more.

3 BAD MEN

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[Caution — this post contains plot spoilers.]

In
modern-day Hollywood it's fashionable to analyze drama in terms of
“character arc”.  A character starts off a tale with a problem
which he or she must then develop the skills and inner resources to
solve, and this development follows a chartable arc.  I think
corporate executives are drawn to this model of storytelling because it
reminds them of the charts and case studies they used in business
school — it reduces human experience to something resembling the
problem of growing a business or maximizing profits.

The model is useless, of course, for understanding the actual life
experiences of human beings or the great stories and dramas in the art
of the past.  Achilles has no character arc, neither does
Hamlet.  They both undergo various experiences which sometimes
reveal their characters, and sometimes make their characters seem
hopelessly mysterious.  Neither of them “solves” anything.

The character arc model is particularly useless for analyzing the films
of John Ford, which are full of characters who suddenly do complete
turnarounds, often without the slightest explicit motivation — the
most famous case in point being Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. 
Their “arcs” are unchartable, mysterious — they raise more questions
than they answer, but the questions are ones of profound interest . . .
they provoke moral thought in audiences.

In 3 Bad Men, a silent film by
Ford from 1926, three criminals are suddenly converted into saints by a
young woman who mistakes them for heroes, and from that moment on they
behave like heroes, and in the end sacrifice their lives for her. 
Such a tale would never make it past the first story conference in
Hollywood today.  The film would have to spend most of its length
working up to that moment of conversion, showing the conflict within
the men as they struggled with the decision to be good.

Instead, Ford presents us with a mystery up front, and lets us spend
the rest of the film wondering what it means.  For Ford, the
answer lies somewhere in the realm of the moral, the spiritual, the
religious.  This is a realm not studied in business schools, not
relevant to ordinary business practice, and thus meaningless to the
corporate executives who run Hollywood today.  In modern corporate
culture, which is Hollywood's culture, moral issues are covered by
charitable contributions, perhaps by a dedication to ethical behavior
or to worthy political causes.  The issue of saving souls does not
arise.

But the saving of souls is what Ford's films most often concern, which
involves positing the existence of souls in the first place.  3 Bad Men
suggests that the worst of men have souls and are just waiting for a
chance to save them — just waiting for a call to goodness.  And
it further suggests that goodness is not always approached on paths
with chartable arcs.  Sometimes goodness descends on men like a
dove and changes them in an instant.

We may cheer when the hapless nerd grows his business or maximizes his
profits against all odds — but the bad men in Ford's movies,
unaccountably redeemed, make us cry.  It can be argued that they
also make us wise in the actual ways of the human heart.

[With thanks to the Silents Are Golden web site for the images above.]

THE IRON HORSE

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You can look at John Ford's The Iron Horse
in two ways — as a silent melodrama set against the epic backdrop of
the building of the transcontinental railroad, or as an epic poem about
the building of that railroad with some melodrama woven through it to
give it a more coherent structure.

In truth the film is both these things, simultaneously or alternately
— the two halves of its nature are never entirely reconciled.

The melodrama isn't at all bad — it's entertaining and sometimes
moving — though it has one of the lamest lovers' misunderstandings in
all of movies.  (Interestingly, the international version of the
film tries, through rewritten intertitles, to make the misunderstanding
more plausible but just succeeds in making it even lamer than it already was.)  The real
problem is that the epic poem which hosts
the melodramatic narrative is one of the most sublime achievements of
the silent cinema.  It's hard to imagine any melodrama which could
holds its own with such poetry.  (It should be noted that Griffith
faced the same dilemma with The Birth Of A Nation, and similarly failed to solve it.)

The epic poem within The Iron Horse
has themes and developments peculiar to itself.  Ford is
interested, as he often was, in the process of things, which in this
case centers on the land, the physical fact of the land, which
determined the challenge the road builders faced.  Ford is also
interested in the moral development this challenge prompted —
specifically the uniting of diverse peoples in a national consciousness.

The inclusiveness of the film is notable, and notably modern. 
Building the railroad unites former antagonists in the civil war
between
North and South.  It unites Eastern engineers with Western scouts
and hunters.  It unites ethnic groups — most specifically the
Irish
and the Italians, though there are a few scenes demonstrating
good-natured camaraderie between Europeans and Chinese.  It unites
women and men, who at one point take
up arms together to rescue some besieged track layers . . . and in the
climax of that scene, a band of light cavalry rides to the rescue —
not U. S. soldiers but Pawnee Indians, allies of the train
workers.  The only people conspicuously absent from this American
mosaic are blacks — probably to avoid alienating white Southern
audiences of the time.

The epic poem of America that's at the heart of The Iron Horse unfolds
at a stately pace, even though it's brimful of incident and exquisite
lyrical images.  (There's enough pure cinema in this picture to
supply a dozen ordinary movies)  Unless you surrender to its
rhythms, are willing
to just sit back and enjoy the sheer spectacle of it, you are likely to
find The Iron Horse tough going.  If you're primarily interested in the
melodrama, wanting Ford to get on with it already, you'll find it even
tougher going.

On the other hand, if you let Ford take you at his own pace, show you
want he wants you to see, you'll be deeply rewarded.  Here is the
vernacular lyricism of Leaves Of Grass
applied to a truly epic subject and translated into visual terms that
transcend its melodramatic armature.  It's an imperfect but genuinely awesome work.

The film is part of the new Ford At Fox
box set, where it's presented in two versions — the American release
and the somewhat abridged international release, derived from a
separate negative made up of second-camera shots and alternate
takes.  The American version is far superior but apparently better
print material survives from the international version.  You
really need to be familiar with both to appreciate the film fully.

The international version on the set has a first-rate commentary by
Robert Birchard, filled with a wealth of information about the
personalities involved in the making of the film and about the
production.

JUST PALS

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Just Pals, the first film John Ford made for Fox, makes an
illuminating pendant to another silent film also recently released on
DVD, D. W. Griffith's True Heart Susie.  They could have been made by
the same director — which is to say that Ford, the younger of the two
and the one newer to the business, obviously studied hard at his
master's feet.




Both films fall into the American Pastoral genre, both feature plots
that are outrageously melodramatic, unashamedly sentimental — and both
are visual masterpieces.




We forget it sometimes, but American culture is in love with virtue — a
love tempered only by the desire not to be taken for a fool.  We like
our virtue delivered sidewise.  In less cynical times than the present,
this sidewise delivery could be only slightly oblique.  So we have
Griffith's gentle teasing of the innocent protagonists of his tale, and
Ford's cursing urchin in his.  But simple decency is the theme of each
film — as it is of Huckleberry Finn, from an earlier age, and of Casablanca, from a later one.  The differences in attitude mainly
involve how cynical the narrator or protagonist has to pretend to be
before getting down to doing or celebrating the right thing.




The message of most works of art can be boiled down to a platitude, if
one is so inclined.  The message of Huckleberry Finn is “blacks are
human, too, and anyone who thinks otherwise risks losing his or her own
humanity.”  But art is not about messages.  It's about creating psychic
movement within the audience — about internalizing the wisdom
trivialized in a platitude.




In silent movies, this process of internalization happens visually —
not in the plot or in the intertitles.  In Just Pals, Ford convinces
us that he loves his protagonists not by making them narrative agents of
good but by the way he situates them in space, in the settings of the
story.  The cursing urchin is revealed as plucky and independent and
admirable not by his curses but by the way he rides a moving train.
Bim's moral authority in foiling the express office robbery is conveyed
not by his statements of resolve but by the way he commandeers and rides
a horse in the execution of his resolve.




Just Pals is a celebration of sacrifice — of the mechanics of
sacrifice — not a sermon about sacrifice.  It makes sacrifice seem
beautiful by making the mechanics of sacrifice beautiful.

Just Pals is part of the recently released Ford At Fox DVD box set.  It can't be said often enough that the release of
this set is one of the most important cultural events of
recent times.